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W. B. Yeats
“Love comes in at the eye.” — W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats , rhyming with gates.}} (13 June 1865 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1924, he chaired a coinage committee charged with selecting a set of designs for the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware of the symbolic power latent in the imagery of a young state's currency, he sought a form that was "elegant, racy of the soil, and utterly unpolitical".Foster (2003), p. 333 When the house finally decided on the artwork of Percy Metcalfe, Yeats was pleased, though he regretted that compromise had led to "lost muscular tension" in the finally depicted images. He retired from the Senate in 1928 because of ill health. Towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression, which led some to question whether democracy could cope with deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies. During the aftermath of the First World War, he became sceptical about the efficacy of democratic government, and anticipated political reconstruction in Europe through totalitarian rule.Foster (2003), p. 468 His later association with Pound drew him towards Benito Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions.Moses, Michael Valdez. "The Poet As Politician". Reason, February 2001. Retrieved on 3 June 2007. He wrote three "marching songs"—never used—for the Irish General Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts. Influences Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a member of the paranormal research organisation "The Ghost Club" (in 1911) and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.Burke, Martin J. "Daidra from Philadelphia: Thomas Holley, Chivers and The Sons of Usna". Columbia University, 7 October 2005. Retrieved on 15 July 2007. As early as 1892, he wrote: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."Ellmann, Richard (1948). Yeats: The Man and the Masks. (New York) Macmillan. 94 His mystical interests—also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and the occult—formed much of the basis of his late poetry. Mendelson, Edward (ed.) "W. H. Auden" . The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. II, 1939–1948, 2002. Retrieved on 26 May 2007. Notes References Category:Irish poets Category:Modernists